PULLMAN, WASHINGTON— A new study of human remains from southwest Colorado suggests that ancestral Pueblo people living in the Mesa Verde area between 1140 and 1180 experienced a particularly violent era, reports Washington State University News. Archaeologist Tim Kohler and his colleagues found that almost nine out of ten sets of human remains dating to this period show evidence of skull and arm trauma from violent blows. “If we’re identifying that much trauma, many were dying a violent death,” says Kohler. However, human remains from the nearby northern Rio Grande area that date to the same time show much less evidence of trauma. According to Kohler, cultural differences between the two areas may explain the discrepancy in levels of violence. In the Rio Grande area, people did not rely on kin groups as much as in Mesa Verde, and joined larger groups such as medicine societies that spanned separate villages and promoted links between family groups. Kohler also sees more specialization of crafts in the Northern Rio Grande, which could be significant. "When you don’t have specialization in societies, there’s a sense in which everybody is a competitor because everybody is doing the same thing,” he notes. By the late thirteenth century, the Mesa Verde region was completely abandoned.